Don’t give in to pot decriminalization

Tom Wolf, lame-duck governor of Pennsylvania, just announced in a tweet that he wanted the commonwealth to legalize pot. His comment, to which I responded in a way I can’t reproduce in a family publication, was hailed as timely, necessary and courageous by many of his lame-duck followers on social media.

Of course it was. There is a huge constituency in Pennsylvania, and nationally, for ending what some call a prohibition and others view as a commonsense limitation on recreational marijuana. It is important to note that neither Wolf nor I are referring to medical cannabis, which is legal in this state and which has helped scores of afflicted citizens find solace from their pain. That is compassionate care, and it should have been available to patients who suffer from a host of treatable diseases decades ago.

No, Wolf and I are referring to the occasional toker, the weekend smoker, the casual partaker, the people who amble through Rittenhouse Square with their doggies and their doobies enjoying a nice spring day while polluting the atmosphere with that sickening sweet stench of “happy daze.”

There is value in keeping a legal and societal brake on marijuana, and I will present you with two reasons: Two humans I once loved.

The first human is a person I dated over a decade ago, a wonderful man of limitless intelligence who was, when I knew him, emerging from a 20-year tunnel of drug use. He’d been clean for a long time, but that drug use had deprived him of a large chunk of his youth. He had dropped out of school, worked at menial jobs that didn’t challenge the brilliance of his mind, lived in somebody’s basement, and had toxic relationships with other users. When I met him, he was back in school, healthy, working in his desired profession and cognizant of his fortune, and his close brush with the abyss.

I was writing a column about legalization of pot years ago, and he told me in no uncertain terms that the studies he had done proved that pot smoking had a negative biological impact on the developing brain. He also told me, from personal experience, that it had stolen some of the best years of his life from him, and that had pot been legal when he first tried it, he would have tried it sooner.

I have spoken, often, about a close family member who died of suicide. It was an overdose, and so we don’t know if it was deliberate or accidental. But my relative’s introduction to drugs came through some high school friends, and came in the form of a joint. And that joint led to more, to daily use, and then to other drugs higher up on the food chain, and then to things more easily accessible, like pills, and then back to drugs that you needed to get from “someone that someone knew,” and then circling back to the “legal stuff.”

People who have no problem with legalization will discount my anecdotal stories, and say that they have their own human anecdotes, people they know who can smoke pot in the evening and go into a courtroom or the operating room or even to the altar and say Mass, the very next day. They might even admit that they, themselves, are fully functioning pot smokers, and will ask me, “Well, do you drink alcohol?”

I do drink alcohol. I will have a glass of wine with a huge plate of pasta, once or twice a week. I do not drink wine just to get buzzed, although I know that there are people, some I grew up with, who do just that. Clearly, alcohol can be a problem.

But that’s not the point. In the first place, acknowledging that one substance causes illness and disease, and creates social mayhem, does not mean that we should double down on that crisis by adding another “de-controlled” substance to the mix.

We are at a place in this society where we have a huge drug crisis. We have people driving under the influence of one substance, and we seek to legalize another. We pretend that it’s about race (everything is these days) and that the Black community has been disproportionately impacted by arrests and criminalization. That part is likely true. But so what? Crack down on everyone equally, don’t discriminate.

But don’t create an environment where we guarantee more problems, more DUIs, more lost decades and more family members, knelt over in pain, at the cemetery.